For the Win by Cory Doctorow (cheapest way to read ebooks TXT) 📖

45 percent in the ideal scenario, and that was in a tight market where most people were happy to be taking in one or two percent. This was the kind of promise he associated with crazy, high-risk ventures, not anything "fully hedged."

He stopped Ira's enthusiastically sputtering explanation, said, "You said no-risk there, buddy?"

Ira drew in a breath. "Did I say that?"

"Yup."

"Well, you know, everything's got a risk. But yeah, I'm putting my own money into this." He swallowed. "I don't want to pressure you --"

Connor couldn't help himself, he snorted. Ira had many things going for him, but he was a pushy son of a bitch.

"Really!" But he sounded contrite. "OK, let me be straight with you. I didn't believe it myself, either. None of us did. You know what bond salesmen are like, we've seen it all. But there were kids in the office, straight out of school. These kids, they have a lot more time to play than we do --" Connor repressed the snort, but just barely. The last time Ira played a game, it had been World of Warcraft, in the dawn of time. He was a competent, if unimaginative broker, but he was no gamer. That's OK, he also wasn't a pork-farmer, but he could still buy pork-futures. "-- and they were hearing about this stuff from other players. They'd started buying in for themselves, using their monthly bonuses, you know, it's kind of a tradition to treat that bonus money as pennies from heaven and spend it on long-shot bets. Anyway, they started to clean up, and clean up, and clean up."

"So how do you know it's not tapped out?"

"That's the thing. A couple of the old timers bought into it and you know, they started to clean up too. And then I got in on it --"

"How long ago?"

"Two months ago," he said, sheepishly. "It's paying a monthly coupon of 16 percent on average. I've started to move my long-term savings into it too."

"Two months? How many of your other clients have you brought in on this deal?" He felt a curious mixture of anger and elation -- how dare Ira keep this to himself, and how fine that he was about to share it!

"None!" Ira was speaking quickly now. "Look, Connor, all my cards on the table now. You're the best customer I got. Without you, hell, my take home pay'd probably be cut in half. The only reason I haven't brought this to you before now is, you know, there wasn't any more to go around! Any time there was an offer on these things, they'd be snapped up in a second."

"So what happened? Did all your greedy pals get their fill?"

Ira laughed. "Not hardly! But you know how it goes, as soon as something takes off like these vouchers, there's a lot of people trying to figure out how to make more of them. Turns out there's a bank, one of these offshore ones that's some Dubai prince's private fortune, and the Prince is a doubter. The bank's selling very long bets against these bonds on great terms. They're one-year coupons and they pay off big if the bonds don't crash. So now there's some uncertainty in the pool and some people are flipping, betting that the Prince knows something they don't, buying his paper and selling their bonds. We've gone one better: we've got a floating pool of hedged-off packages that balance out the Prince's bets and these bonds, so no matter what happens, you're in the green. We buy or sell every day based on the rates on each. It's --"

"Risk free?"

"Virtually risk free. Absolutely."

Connor's mouth was dry. There was something going on here, something big. His mind was at war with itself. Finance was a game, the biggest game, and the rules were set by the players, not by a designer. Sometimes the rules went crazy and you got a little pocket of insanity, where a small bet could give you unimaginable wins. He knew how this worked. Of course he did. Hadn't he been chasing gold farmers up and down nine worlds, trying to find their own little high-return pockets and turn them inside out? At the same time, there was just no such thing as a free lunch. Something that looked too good to be true probably was too good to be true. All that and all the other sayings he'd grown up with, all that commonsense that his simple parents had gifted him with, them with their small-town house and no mortgage and sensible retirement funds that would have them clipping coupons and going to two-for-one sales for the rest of their lives.

"Twenty grand," he blurted. It was a lot, but he could handle it. He'd made more than that on his investments in the past 90 days. He could make it up in the next 90 days if --

"Twenty? Are you kidding? Connor, look, this is the kind of thing comes along once in a lifetime! I came to you first, buddy, so you could get in big. Shit, buddy, I'll sell you twenty grand's worth of these things, but I tell you what --"

It made him feel small, even though he knew it was supposed to make him feel small. It was like there were two Connors, a cool, rational one and an emotional one, bitterly fighting over control of his body. Rational won, though it was a hard-fought thing.

"Twenty's all I've got in cash right now," he lied, emotional Connor winning this small concession. "If I could afford more --"

"Oh!" Ira said, and Connor could hear the toothy smile in his voice. "Connor, pal, I don't do this very often, and I'd appreciate it if you'd keep this to yourself, but how about if I promise you that your normal trades for today will pick up an extra, uh, make it 20 more, for a total of 40 thousand. Would you want to plow that profit into these puppies?"

Connor's mouth went dry. He knew how this worked, but he'd long ago given up on being a part of it. It was the oldest broker-scam in the world: every day, brokers made a number of "off-book" trades, buying stocks and bonds and derivatives on the hunch that they'd go up. Being "off-book" meant that these trades weren't assigned to any particular client's account; the money to buy them came out of the general account for the brokerage house.

At the end of the day, some -- maybe all -- of those trades would have come out ahead. Some -- maybe all -- would have come out behind. And that's when the magic began. By back-dating the books, the broker could assign the shitty trades to shitty customers, cheapskates, or big, locked-in, slow-moving customers, like loosely-managed estates for long-dead people whose wealth was held in trust. The gains could be written to the broker's best customers, like some billionaire that the broker was hoping to do more business with. In this way, every broker got a certain amount of discretion every day in choosing who would make money and who would lose it. It was just a larger version of the barista at the coffee shop slipping her regulars a large instead of a medium every now and again, without charging for the upgrade. The partners who ran the brokerages knew that this was going on, and so did many of the customers. It was impossible to prove that you'd lost money or gained money this way -- unless your broker told you at 9:15 on a Tuesday morning that your account would have an extra $20,000 in it by 5PM.

Ira had just taken a big risk in telling Connor what he was going to do for him. Now that he had this admission, he could, theoretically, have Ira arrested for securities fraud. That is, until and unless he gave Ira the go-ahead, at which point they'd both be guilty, in on it together.

And there rational and emotional Connor wrestled, on the knife-edge between wealth and conspiracy and pointless, gainless honesty. They tumbled onto the conspiracy side. After all, Connor and the broker bent the rules every time Connor ordered a trade on one of Coca Cola Games's futures. This was just the same thing, only moreso.

"Do it," he said. "Thanks, Ira."

Ira's breath whooshed out over the phone, and Connor realized that the broker had been holding his breath and waiting on his reply, waiting to find out if he'd gone too far. The salesman really wanted to sell him this package.

Later, in Command Central, Connor watched his feeds and thought about it, and something felt...hinky. Why had Ira been so eager? Because Connor was such a great customer and Ira thought if he made Connor a ton of money, Connor would give it back to him to continue investing, making more and more money for him, and more and more commissions for the broker?

And now that his antennae were up, he started to see all kinds of ghosts in his feeds, little hints of gold and elite items changing hands in funny ways, valued too high or not high enough, all out of whack with the actual value in-game. Of course, who knew what the in-game value of anything could really be? Say the game-runners decided to make the Zombie Mecha gatling guns fire depleted uranium ammo, starting six months from now. The easy calculation had gatling guns shooting up in value in six months, because it would make it possible for the Mechas to wade through giant hordes of zombies without being overpowered. But what if that made the game too easy, and lots of players left? Once your buddies went over to Anthills and Hives and started team-playing huge, warring hive-intelligences, would you want to hang around Zombie Mecha, alone and forlorn, firing your gatling gun at the zombies? Would the zombies stop being fun objectives and start being mere collections of growling pixels?

It took the subtle fingerspitzengefuhl of a fortune-teller to really predict what would happen to the game when you nerfed or buffed one character class or weapon or monster. Every change like this was watched closely by game-runners for weeks, around the clock, and they'd tweak the characteristics of the change from minute to minute, trying to get the game into balance.

The feeds told the story. Out there in gameland, there was a hell of a lot of activity, trades back and forth, and it worried him. He started to ask the other game-runners if they noticed anything out of the ordinary but then something else leapt out of his feeds: there! Gold-farmers!

He'd been looking for them everywhere, and finding them. Gold farming had a number of signatures that you could spot with the right feed. Any time someone logged in from a mysterious Asian IP address, walked to the nearest trading post, stripped off every scrap of armor and bling and sold it, then took all the resulting cash and the entire contents of her guild bank and turned it over to some level one noob on a free trial account that had only started a n hour before, who, in turn, turned the money over to a series of several hundred more noobs who quickly scattered and deposited it in their own guild banks, well, that was a sure bet you'd found some gold farmer who was hacking accounts. Hell, half the time you could tell who the farmers were just by looking at the names they gave their guilds: real players either went for the heroic ("Savage Thunder") or the ironic ("The Nerf Herders") or the eponymous ("Jim's Raiders") but they rarely went by "asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf2329" or, God help him, 707A55DF0D7E15BBB9FB3BE16562F22C026A882E40164C7B149B15DE7137ED1A.